Not Clark Kent But Joel Weatherfield

Poul Anderson, "Earthman, Beware!" IN Anderson, Alight In The Void (New York, August 1993), pp. 29-60.

Can a humanoid being with superior sensory powers and intelligence come from an extra-solar planet and live on Earth, passing himself off as a human being? I would say definitely not. Quite apart from the problems of crossing an interstellar distance and entering the Solar System undetected, evolution on another planet is not going to produce anything that looks remotely like us. Yet this proposition is the premise not only of Superman but also Poul Anderson's "Earthman, Beware!"

In Anderson's "Starfog," Daven Laure is satisfied that the Kirkasanters are human - or, at least, are of human descent - because of their detailed physical resemblance except, of course, for expectable racial differences. Joel Weatherfield does not resemble us in every detail but is close enough to carry off the deception. We just have to accept this as the kind of sf that was written in the 1950's. I don't think that Weatherfield arrived in a spaceship but will have to reread to check.

(Retold stories are updated. In 1938, Superman arrived, as a baby, in a small spacecraft. In the twenty-first century, such a craft would have been detected approaching Earth - except that it arrived as one small part of a massive meteor shower!)

What We Read

Second hand bookshops remind us of what we used to read and regard as important. James Bond has endured whereas his TV spin-offs, the Man and Girl from UNCLE have not. In the 1960's, I read sf paperbacks because I had graduated from comic strips to prose fiction about people in spaceships and on other planets with robots and aliens. Nowadays, an sf novel has to contain much more than these sf trappings to hold my attention. As we know, Poul Anderson and James Blish do offer much more than that.

A fictional universe can expand in different directions, incorporating different kinds of fiction, e.g.:

Poul Anderson

James Ching attends school in San Francisco Integrate in the period of the Solar Commonwealth and the Polesotechnic League.

James Blish

The energy beings called Angels who appear in two juvenile novels also form part of the background of an adult short story with a very different tone and theme.

Ian Fleming

Dexter Smythe committed murder in 1945 and must face the consequences two decades later. It is a minor detail that the man sent from London to interview him is called James Bond - although we also learn an extra biographical detail about Bond.

Dornford Yates

The Berry books are (supposed) humour although Berry Pleydell's cousin, Jonathan Mansel, tracks down criminals in the Chandos books and The Stolen March, belonging to neither series but sharing some characters with them, is a fantasy.

Read them all.

(I bought the book shown today.)

"Gods" And Danellians

"Flight to Forever."

Anyone who travels far enough into the future in this timeline will encounter beings that Martin Saunders thinks of as "gods." (p. 233) Their city is described here. They are the nearest equivalent to the Danellians in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol Series. These "gods":

make the time projector airtight and indestructible;

increase its speed to millions of years per minute;

insert an "...annihilating device..." (p. 239) which destroys the projector as soon as it has returned to 1973.

"They didn't want its devices from the future loose in the twentieth century." (ibid.)

In other words, they perform a Time Patrol function in their timeline. Presumably they have time travel technology and take other measures to preserve the timeline. There is always more than we know.

Memorable Moments In THERE WILL BE TIME

These are so numerous that it might become tedious to try to summarize them all.

(i) Jack Havig's mother, holding Jack as a baby, hears a baby crying in another room, walks through to investigate, sees a baby identical to Jack lying and crying on a bed and in her surprise drops Jack who at that moment disappears. The shock of falling has caused him to travel a few seconds into the past.

(ii) A brutal white supremacist time travel organization, the Eyrie, recruits Havig, Boris and a few other time travellers in Jerusalem on the presumed day of the Crucifixion. Later, Havig, organizing against the Eyrie, sends Boris to Jerusalem on that day to infiltrate the Eyrie.

(iii) Havig and Leonce glimpse the Star Masters - interstellar travellers, including aliens - and immediately flee downtime, not yet suspecting that they themselves will found a time travel group that will bring about the Star Masters civilization.

(iv) Parachutists time travel while falling in order to attack a target in a future century.

(v) Time travellers can travel backward and forward inside a slower-than-light (STL) interstellar spaceship but might not need to because time travel is mathematically equivalent to faster-than-light (FTL) travel so that FTL ships might be developed. Thus, There Will Be Time has two potential sequels, one STL, the other FTL.

Some Peak Moments In Time Travel Literature

 

(i) The Time Traveller sits on the Time Machine on a silent beach near the end of life on Earth.

(ii) The outer narrator speculates that the Time Traveller:

"...may even now - if I may use the phrase - be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age."

-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), EPILOGUE, p. 101.

(iii) Martin Saunders fixes a sandwich in the time projector between the death and birth of the universe.

(iv) Time Patrol agents seeking the event that had transformed Veleda into an anti-Roman prophetess intervene and save her life on the beach where she is being raped by Roman sailors...

There must be others but these four, two from Wells and two from Anderson, came easily to mind over coffee on a wet Sunday morning. Stay tuned.

(One more thought on the matter: beaches are places where important events happen, starting with trilobites crawling onto land. In Hawksbill Station by Robert Siverberg, a time traveller sees one.)

From Wells To Anderson

In HG Wells' The Time Machine, a nineteenth century scientist constructs the Time Machine, sets off into the future and learns that mankind will devolve.

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol, a twentieth century engineer is recruited by a time travelling organization founded in the future by our evolutionary successors. The Patrol addresses those "...curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion..." that Wells' outer narrator had only hinted at. 

Although Wells and Anderson are not the only sf writers to address the concept of time travel, the treatment of this idea by these two authors is extremely comprehensive. This is my last thought of the day after the completion of a rereading of Anderson's Wellsian narrative, "Flight to Forever."

What comes next? (We don't know yet.)

Good night.

Ancientness, Modernity And Futurity

The phrases, "ancient civilizations" and "modern machines," convey opposite, contradictory, antithetical connotations. (I think.) Yet sf writers imagine ancient civilizations with machines on other planets and in our future. It is to be hoped that such civilizations do and will exist - although, if there had been any in nearby planetary systems, then they should have been detected by now.

In 50,000 AD:

"They went through immense vaulted caverns hewed out of the rock, dank tunnels of silence where their footfalls echoed weirdly and shadows flitted beyond the dull glow of fluorospheres. Now and then they passed a looming monstrous bulk, the corroded hulk of some old machine."

-"Flight to Forever," p. 209. 

And see also Something Basic on the James Blish Appreciation blog.

Time Machines

Although the time machine in Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" is called a "time projector," the story reverts to the by now familiar phrase, "time machine," before the end of the narrative. We probably think of time machines as vehicles that people travel in, like this projector and the TARDIS. The latter is bigger outside than in, exploiting extra spatial dimensions. Anderson's first Time Patrol story, "Time Patrol," features two time shuttles that enclose their passengers, the first, used by the Patrol, described as a large metal box. The second is a model from the Ing Empire, date unspecified although it is some time after 2987 from which it is separated by an Interregnum. However, Patrol agents usually time travel by means of timecycles which resemble HG Wells' original Time Machine in that they are vehicles which the traveller sits on. In Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis, an anakro encloses its passengers and travels through time while also following a great circle around the Earth's surface and a malfunctioning anakro and can pick up living beings outside it and carry them along with it, hence the involvement of the twentieth century viewpoint character and a handful of individuals from earlier periods.

Must dash.

Inside Quotation Marks

"In any case - if you traveled long enough, through space or time, you got back to your starting point."

-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, November 1984), pp. 207-288 AT p. 287.

This confirms something that was almost 100% obvious, that "space of time..." (my emphasis) was incorrect in Alight In The Void. See the previous post. We always have to check to be 100% sure what an author had intended. It might just possibly have been something unusual and not obvious. In any case, I would have been wrong to correct of to or when quoting the story as presented in Alight In The Void. Words between quotation marks have to be quoted as given. Apparently, when James Joyce dictated Finnegans Wake to Samuel Beckett, the latter was careful to write exactly what Joyce said because he, Beckett, did not understand any of it. Checking through what Beckett had written, Joyce found that the words, "come in," had been inserted because he, Joyce, had called, "Come in," in response to a knock on the door while he was dictating. Beckett thought that, since "come in" was an error, it should be removed but Joyce replied along the lines of: "This is a book about the cosmos. If the cosmos is going to take a hand in writing it, all the better. Leave it in." Reportedly, Beckett was disgusted.

Willis McNelly confirmed the truth of this story in conversation in a Dublin pub. James Blish was also a Joyce scholar. See his A Case Of Conscience and Spock Must Die!

This story of quotation marks has taken us away from Poul Anderson but not from fantastic or cosmic fiction.

The End Of The Flight To Forever

"Flight to Forever."

Memorable passages from the concluding section:

"Entropy had reached a maximum, the energy sources were used up, the universe was dead." (p. 235)

"The universe was mortal, but it was a phoenix which would never really die." (p. 236)

"...the continuum was spherical in all four dimensions. In any case - if you travelled long enough, through space of time, you got back to your starting point." (p. 238)

(That should probably read "...space or time..." I will check the text in Past Times.)

"Grayness was outside - for the last time." (ibid.)

"The hill seemed strangely unreal, after all that he had seen from it, the whole enormous tomorrow of the cosmos. He would never quite fit into the little round of days that lay ahead." (p. 239)

That recalls Olaf Stapledon's narrator returning home at the end of Star Maker.

"...he thought he heard [Taury's] voice whisper in the cool wet wind..." (ibid.)

There has to be wind. For this peaceful conclusion, the wind is cool, not cold, as it had been/was to be in 50,000 AD, and it does not roar or shout but whispers.

"It was enough for a mortal man." (p. 220)

"'I guess I must be a little early.'" (ibid.)

- the concluding sentence.

See also Cosmic Beginnings.